When a border incident occurs between two countries that have a combined population of nearly three billion, are both nuclear-armed, and drag on an old rivalry, it’s good to pay attention. However, this incident only caused minor injuries.
It happened last Friday in the Himalayas, at a point of contact along the 3,488 kilometer border between China and India. Versions differ: India’s Defense Minister yesterday accused several hundred Chinese soldiers of having crossed the border and attacked Indian garrisons. Beijing, for its part, claims that it was the Indians who blocked the routes of the Chinese patrols.
Both armies had an old agreement that prohibited their soldiers on the border from carrying firearms, which thankfully limited the number of casualties. A short video released in India shows Indian soldiers beating back the Chinese with sticks, a spectacle that is astounding in terms of an overly equipped military force.
Since then, calm appears to have returned, but the incident suggests that nothing has been resolved since the far more serious border clashes that occurred in June 2020, and which left several dozen people dead.
The longstanding boundary dispute between India and China has lasted for decades, and sparked war in 1962. Since then, a provisional line, the “Line of Effective Control”, awaits a permanent solution that has not come.
But the rivalry is more global between the two Asian giants, who are unable to overcome their distrust, despite repeated attempts. In 2019, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi posed casually in a grand setting, to mark their deal. But the following year their armies clashed, and the cold war climate returned to Asia.
The most surprising thing about these new tensions is that the war in Ukraine has changed the game. India has refused to condemn Russia, its old Soviet-era ally, its main supplier of weapons and hydrocarbons. On the one hand, India joins China, Russia’s main strategic partner against the United States. But between friend and foe, the border is not that simple.
India seems determined to play its own cards. He saw himself as a new power where China had turned itself into a superpower, with both good and bad sides. New Delhi is thus trying to attract investment scared by the Chinese political context, such as Apple, which has set up a second industrial base in India.
And India sees itself as an autonomous regional power, capable of becoming an ally of the United States in the “Quad”, with Japan, Australia, to confront China; but also being able to say “no” to Americans in Russia.
However, this emergence of autonomy is hampered by competition with China, by Beijing’s special relationship with its feared neighbor Pakistan, and by the increasingly tense geopolitical context in Asia. What repeated border incidents tell us is that if India one day has to choose its side, in a polarizing Asia, it will not be China.
